What's wrong with eating animals? Animals eat animals, so it's natural.

When a person asserts unequivocably and with strong conviction that it is simply wrong to kill animals for food, and you notice that they are wearing leather, how do you respond?

A quick question about animal ethics. Presumably, the philosopher who responds to this would agree that if we were currently doing to humans what we do to animals in our food systems—that is, breeding and slaughtering them by the billions every year, not out of nutritional necessity, but for the sake of taste pleasure—that would be immoral. (I sure hope so!) So the question is: What is the trait absent in nonhuman animals that, if also absent in humans, would justify breeding and slaughtering humans by the billions for something as trivial as taste pleasure? The knee-jerk justification today’s nonvegans would give is that, relative to humans, animals have diminished mental capacities, and that mass confinement and slaughter is therefore acceptable. But surely intelligence can’t be the trait, because the same nonvegans would never dream of arguing that it’s okay to confine and slaughter a human being (let alone billions of them) just because he has a level of intelligence equivalent to that of a pig or...

Defenders of animals' rights argue that other people are "speciesists" (like some people are racists). I would like to ask if speciesism is always wrong. Suppose healthy adult people have some features that make them important (say, they can speak and they can reason in complicated ways) and that no non-human animals have. Suppose those features give adult healthy humans some rights. Is it necessarily wrong to assign those rights also to human babies and mentally handicapped humans, but not to non-human animals? We would recognize those rights in babies and the mentally impaired because we like them more than we like other animals (as a matter of fact, most of us are speciesists), but animals couldn't complain about that, could they? Anyway, they wouldn't be offended. I also think this argument would not make racism acceptable.

I'm told Kantians believe something like the following: that it would be inconsistent to respect our own preferences and not the preferences of others. If so, while pro-vegetarian arguments are often couched in terms of suffering and consequences, aren't there strong Kantian arguments for vegetarianism also? After all, many non-human animals do have preferences and desires, and generally prefer not to be eaten or killed.

Did Socrates believe that animals possessed souls? I come to a logical contradiction when I apply his teachings to the question.

When a human kills an animal for food, the human does not pay for the crime of killing that animal. But when a human kills another human; there is are arrests, forensic investigations, court drama, imprisonment, and even death penalty. What makes mankind so important and animals so disposable? Why are animals denied from justice? Why does a human feels the need to bleed an animal for food when he/she can survive on plants? For the religious lot: In the eyes of God, all beings are equals. He loves each one of them equally. So by this logic, he cherishes each life equally. For God, a human who has killed seven innocent humans is as guilty as a human child who has killed seven birds for thrill. Then why are crimes against animals not the same as crimes against humans?

Are people who are vegan, and also make their pets vegan( by giving them vegan anima food) doing something ethically correct since their pets can't really decide if they want to be vegan or not, and it's against their natural behavior to be vegan?

"Eating animals can't be bad because how do you know plants don't have feelings" is a common argument against vegans. Is that a good argument?

Do non-human animals have self awareness?